Second, is an excellent article on big data recently published by the Harvard Business Review. This article points out that big data will make an impact, but not in the traditional sense. “Traditional” big data analytics focuses on prediction, but in the future big data will have more transformative impact on areas such as mobile-location analytics, personalized medicine, and artificial intelligence.

In this era of digital everything, nearly every marketer has access to more data than they can reasonably handle. A single web visit by a single customer can result in thousands of data points across items viewed, locations, durations, browser, referral, clickstream, frequency, etc. Couple that with device, payment methods, demographic data, product attributes, not to mention data across your other channels, and any retailer is quickly drowning in data.

Rushin points that regardless of the size of your data set, your inability to act on this data set is what matters. He advises you to look for solutions that can readily supply BI value and insights.

Finally, I encourage you to spend 40 minutes and watch this video presentation by Jim Stogdill on how corporations will evolve leveraging big data (tasty tidbit: hear how a corporation is compared to a nematode).